THE NEW YORKER tion. If he repudiated his Red doctrines, he alienated Red support; if he pro- claimed himself a Red, he killed the steel strike. He parried and fenced for a long time with the senators, finally broke down, and confessed that he was a red-blooded, hundred-per-cent Amer- ican, a ballyhooer for the war, a Liber- ty Bond buyer to the tune of four hun- dred dollars, and a sound, conservative union-labor man. Foster's conversion was celebrated in the New Republic in a prose hosannah by William Hard en- titled "A HeretIc Turned Church- " man. T HE steel companies made a pi- quan t defence of their labor policy. They placed before the Senate com- mittee the greatest pageant of hale- ness and heartiness the world has ever seen. They called to the witness stand a series of ruddy-cheeked, tight-skinned, bright-eyed, laughing old fellows, broad-breasted as ancient oaks, pros- perous-looking as George F. Bakers. They ranged from seventy-five to ninety years of age, and each testified in a rich, bassoony voice that he had wÐrked, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in the steel mills since he was a tiny tot; that he had raised from nine to fourteen children and garnered modest wealth; that he was firmly convinced that he owed his success to long work- ing hours, and that any shortening of hours would give the mill workers time for mischief and folly and eventually ruin them. , Foster hoped for a sympathetic walkout of the coalminers and railway workers, followed by a general strike and the birth of Soviet America, but the sympathetic strikes did not develop. His followers were bribed back to work by a ten-per-cen t increase in pay, and Foster's life work collapsed. He be- came an undisguised Red and started to commute between New York and Moscow. According to the State De- partment, he pulled the long leg of Moscow for llloderate accommoda- tions-forty thousand dollars in 1921, and ninety thousand and thirty- five thousand dollars on subsequent visits. In 1923, squatting around a pine-knot fire in a Michigan wilderness, Foster and other eminent Reds plotted the overthrow of the lJ nited States. Some of the plotters turned out to be Burns detectives; others turned out to be Department of Justice agents. F os- ter was brought to trial, but his in- nocence and demureness hung the jury. In 1924 Foster ran for president O,l! 21 the Communist ticket. He was defeat- ed, it will be recalled, by Coolidge. In 1928, he ran again, but the voters chose Hoover. T HOlJGH its presidential candi- date, Foster was not the official leader of the Communist Party in America until a year ago. The leader for many years was M. Jay Lovestone, a young City College alumnus. At the Communist national convention in New York last year, Lovestone was defeated by Foster, Lovestone receiv- ing one hundred and sixty-four votes to Foster's one. Harry Pollitt, who attended the convention as a represen- tative of Moscow, intervened to an- nounce that he had received a message from the mother party in Russia, call- ing for the election of Foster. "A min- ority," said the message, "may be a . . " F ' d ma J orIty. oster s one vote was ma e, by parliamentary magic, to outnumber Lovestone's one hundred and sixty- four, and Foster amid frenzied cheer- ing assumed the leadership. Lovestone was shortly after flung out of the party h f " h . "" h on c 'arges a c evostIsm, putsc- ism," "Kautskyanism," and "insuffer- able exceptionalism." Lovestone replied charging Foster with "ideological cor- . "" ." d " 1 . ruptIon, careerIsm, an new- Ine- ism." The Daily Worker, chief organ of the Communists, called Lovestone "not only a petty bourgeois politician and an opportunist, but a burglar and all-around crook as well." This con- troversy is still going on, partly in the pedantic, metaphysical vocabulary of Communist Sectarianism, partly in the lucid idiom of the gutter. rrhe failure of the steel strike was a disappointment from which Foster never completely r e - covered. In 1 91 9 he was the generalissimo of an army of three hundred and fif- tee n thousand steelworkers; to- day he is the leader of a small clinic of nervous disorders. I t is natural that he should be a dis- appointed man. Xerxes w 0 u I d have been disap- pointed, if they took his host away and made him drillmaster of a troop of outpatients from the psycho- pathic ward. It ii remarkable how well F oster has succeeded in adjusting him- self; he has gradually acquired Ham- let's ability to be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. As the years rolled on and the Red revolution in America kept post- poning itself on one shallow pretext after another, Foster began to lose his grip on reality and became a sufferer from the fevered daydreams which tor- ture his Red associates. They live in an atmosphere of crisis. The word "crisis" forms part of nearly every headline in a Red paper. Every day the American Red has several nervous crises which he mistakes for world crIses. The party is split into four major divisions and many minor ones which carryon terrific sectarian conflicts. The Red is a Fundamentalist at heart. He worships authority. Marx and Lenin are the Reds' Old and New Testa- ments, and in their party squabbles they hurl the sacred texts at one another like a lot of hysterical vestrymen. Even the schoolboy Reds have all the poly- syllables of Red jargon at their tongues' tips, while Red journalism consists mainly of bad grammar studded with technical terms such as "possibil- ism," "impossibilism," "program mat- . . "" d ..." " D I Izatlon, contra IctIonlsm, e eon- . "" P ." " I . " d . . " Ism, epperIsm, IqUI atlonIsm, "apexism." The most barren-witted of the Red ignoramuses parade these pompous words with the same con- scious pride which the naked blacks of the upper Nile display when they strut about in collapsi le opera hats and ::' ;: ;'. ' " " 'A:t: ::::;:.: .';'- "If it weren't for card tricks, I'd be an atheist."